When are you old? On average, women answer this question with a higher score than men. This is the result of a study published on Monday in the journal ‘Psychology and Aging’. “On average, women start smoking about two and a half years later at an older age,” explains study author Markus Wettstein from Humboldt University in Berlin. This could be due to the fact that women live longer on average.
Another explanation is that women are more stigmatized than men in old age, the psychologist explained. The start of old age is therefore set higher to distance ourselves from the negative image.
At what age are you ‘old’?
The research by scientists from Humboldt University, Stanford University in the US, the University of Luxembourg and Germany’s University of Greifswald is based on data from the German Age Survey, a Germany-wide representative survey of people aged 40 and over. The researchers evaluated data from about 14,000 people born between 1911 and 1974. The central question is: at what age would you consider someone old?
Increased life expectancy has an impact
Wettstein and his team found that old age for adults today appears to start later than for people born in previous decades. Accordingly, 65-year-olds born in 1955 had the subjective feeling that old age begins at age 75 on average. According to the scientists’ model, old age began at age 71 for 65-year-olds born in 1911.
What does this have to do with? “One point is certain that life expectancy has increased in recent decades,” says Wettstein. According to the Federal Statistical Office in Germany, between 1901 and 1910, 65-year-old men had an average of 10.4 years to live, while women of the same age had about eleven years to live. From 1960 to 1962 in West Germany it was already 12.4 years for men of the same age and another 14.6 years for women. In the years 2019 to 2021, this was 17.8 years for men and approximately 21 years for women. Recently, however, the increase in life expectancy has slowed. Accordingly, according to Wettstein, the trend towards a later observed aging phenomenon is also slowing down.
People are healthier and fitter
Another reason for the development is that the start of retirement is usually associated with being old, but the retirement age has increased over the years, Wettstein explains. Moreover, older people today are on average healthier and fitter than before and therefore appear young for longer.
The participants in the aging study have been interviewed several times over the years. According to Wettstein, when evaluating the data, the scientists discovered another phenomenon: “As a person gets older, they push the onset of old age back a little further,” the psychologist said. An example: a 60-year-old woman, for whom old age begins at the age of 74, discovers at the age of 65 that old age does not begin until the age of 75.
Source: Krone
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